


There were giants in the earth in those days

by CenozoicSynapsid



Category: Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
Genre: Christianity, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 15:53:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2513348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenozoicSynapsid/pseuds/CenozoicSynapsid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There had been three of them for a long time, but now there were two. Giant Pope was old, and Giant Despair was melancholy, and prone to nervous fits. Giant Pagan was dead.</p><p>---</p><p>A funeral scene, somewhat miserable and decidedly outside canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There were giants in the earth in those days

There had been three of them for a long time, but now there were two. Giant Pope was old, and Giant Despair was melancholy, and prone to nervous fits. Giant Pagan was dead. He had gone out hunting one day, and fallen asleep in a sunny field near the roadside, and a band of pilgrims had come along and cut his head from his body.

He had been the elder of the three, and was given to reminiscing about ancient times, when there were giants everywhere. He had had a wife called Giant Philosophy. She had been as tall as a good-sized poplar tree, and well-proportioned with it. He had liked watching her walk: the balance and rebalance of it. To watch a woman that size walk, he used to say, was a reminder that nothing in life was as easy as it looked.

Giant Despair liked Pagan's stories, and when he visited the cave, he often asked for them. He was younger than the other two and didn't remember the time of giants very well. His parents had died when he was still barely five feet high; few people said much about them these days. He wondered whether his fits and spasms were an inheritance from them--- if, as the giants dwindled, their line had become gradually more and more inbred. Giant Pagan claimed not to know, and when Despair dwelt on these things, would cheer him up with tales of bygone heroes: Giant Gog and Giant Magog, who had rattled the sky when they wrestled, and Giant Cormoran, who built an island to live on, all white stone and green grass.

Giant Pope had never had a wife. He didn't like to tell stories. When he did, he mostly made out that the ancient times had been dirty and backward and not as impressive as Pagan liked to pretend. The two of them had lived in cities and castles, and it had been drafty and chilly there; now they lived in a foul little cave and it was still drafty and chilly. They had eaten princes and senators; now they ate pilgrims, who tasted much the same, and were, if anything, even more plentiful. They had known the famous giants of old, and by and large, they had been a bunch of worthless bastards. The first time Giant Despair heard him say this, he wondered if it was a covert stab at him, or Pagan, but by now he thought Pope probably meant what he said.

Despair lived in a dank old castle called Doubtful, and he had married a human girl called Diffidence, who was six and a quarter feet tall. None of the men of her village had wanted to marry her, since they were all shorter than she was, and considered looking up at a woman undignified. Despair hadn't really known if he wanted to get married. Certainly he didn't want children; he thought it best if his painful and miserable disorder died with him. But she had appeared before his gate one evening and insisted that a person like him, who owned several fields and had his own castle, had better be married than single. She had refused to go away, and he suspected, as he often did, that people who talked more than he did must have better ideas.

She told him only afterwards that it was her father's idea--- a strategem to rid himself of his least marriageable daughter and protect himself against the giant in the bargain. He asked if she had wanted to marry him. She said she didn't know. He asked if she wanted him to eat her father. She said she didn't know. They had kept on being married. What else could they do?

Sometimes he asked her opinion on the pilgrims he captured on the road. "Life is bitter," she said, "they may as well kill themselves and spare us the trouble."  
"Does this mean you aren't happy here?" asked Giant Despair, but she just looked at him, and he had never been able to read human faces--- all the features were set too close together.

He and Giant Pope worked together to dig the grave for Giant Pagan. It was slow going. Under the soil was white chalk that their makeshift tools could barely cut into. Giant Despair had fallen down twice in fits, and the second time he had cut his ankle with the shovel. The cut was not deep, but it stung. Giant Pope sat down every few minutes to rest. For the first quarter hour this had looked like laziness, but as the day wore on, he grew drawn and pale. At lunch they divided a sheep between them. Giant Despair was famished with unaccustomed labor, and finished his half (it was the front half) down to the marrowbones, crunching the skull between his teeth. When he looked up, Giant Pope was picking listlessly at the back, with most of the flesh still on it.

"Are you all right?" Despair asked him.  
"I'm fine," said Pope. "I was a builder in my day. I'm just getting my second wind."

And despite the resting, and the wheezing cough he developed later in the afternoon, it was true that Pope was making solid progress, chopping down into the chalk with short, powerful strokes, so Despair didn't feel it would be right to say anything more.

In the evening they lifted Giant Pagan's headless body and lowered it carefully into the grave. They had no cloth for a winding sheet, and it would have been beyond either of them to make a coffin. They didn't even have the head. The pilgrims had taken it, as a trophy of their prowess probably.

Giant Despair looked hopelessly down into the grave. He had thought burying Pagan would bring some sense of closure, but it just looked makeshift and awkward. His arms ached, and he remembered they would have to fill in the grave with chalk chips before they could have dinner, and that he was spending the night in the cave with Pope, where he would sleep on the floor and wake up sorer and stiffer than he already was. He missed Diffidence. He wondered if she missed him. He hoped so, and then not, and then didn't know.

"Should we say something?" he asked, looking at Pope.  
"Pagan was the one for saying something," said Pope, and suddenly he was kneeling on the sod, weeping into his hands. "I wish they had all been burned," he said. "I wish all the pilgrims in the world were burned."

"He used to say," said Despair. "He used to say there was another one of us."  
He gestured at the range of mountains toward which the roadway led on. "He said some of the pilgrims threatened him once, that he mustn't touch them because they were made in the image of God. And we are made much as they are, only bigger. So he said God is no more than another giant, and we needn't fear being the last of our kind after all."  
"I don't miss the giants," said Pope. "You miss the giants, because you never met any outside Pagan's stories. I met them, and they were mostly bastards. I miss Pagan, that's all."

"Do you think it's true?" persisted Giant Despair. "About Giant God?"  
"Something has to eat all those pilgrims," said Giant Pope. "But whatever it is, I doubt it's all that much like us."

He lifted his shovel, and spilt a shower of chalk into the tomb, where it settled, white and comfortless, over the body.

**Author's Note:**

> As die-hard Pilgrim's Progress fans have probably figured out, I wrote this looking at Part One. In Part Two, we learn that Diffidence is also supposed to be a giant, and moreover there are a bunch of other giants (Grim, Maul and Slay-good) wandering around. Cormoran and Gogmagog (and, if you count the chalk grave as a reference, Cerne Abbas) are not Bunyan's, but belong to British folklore in general.


End file.
